I am not sure how I feel about the Mac Pro; I see a lot of laptop style parts in the picture and I don't think that is what Pro Users want when it comes to being able to upgrade their machines...As for iOS7 I really wanted them to get rid of the old design but I expected much more than this and I really dislike how it looks. And something should have been done to move away from the relatively static grid based system. Very meh. Very very meh. I mean I like some of the apps I really do but the apps look like a Windows 8/Metro/Modern design. But the icons ugh they look awful.

12 cores of Xeon CPUs, dual FirePro GPUs and Thunderbolt2 expansion ports are not "laptop style" parts. The specs, design and expansion capabilities are spot on for the Mac Pro. Can't wait to see how they'll be priced.

iOS 7 looks gorgeous in a minimalist way and moves fluidly. It's exactly what a lot of people have been waiting for and I think it's going to help sell iOS devices like hot cakes.

I am not sure how I feel about the Mac Pro; I see a lot of laptop style parts in the picture and I don't think that is what Pro Users want when it comes to being able to upgrade their machines...As for iOS7 I really wanted them to get rid of the old design but I expected much more than this and I really dislike how it looks. And something should have been done to move away from the relatively static grid based system. Very meh. Very very meh. I mean I like some of the apps I really do but the apps look like a Windows 8/Metro/Modern design. But the icons ugh they look awful.

I don't know which parts you mean when you call out "laptop" style parts. I'd like to know, please

I am not sure how I feel about the Mac Pro; I see a lot of laptop style parts in the picture and I don't think that is what Pro Users want when it comes to being able to upgrade their machines.

Exactly. Isn't the point of the Mac Pro that you can swap the parts out, and that the tower is big enough to put more components, like hard drives, or larger components, like double-width extra-long graphics cards, into it?

If I wanted a Mac that wasn't integrated with a display, and that is limited in upgradeability, I would get a Mac Mini.

I am not sure how I feel about the Mac Pro; I see a lot of laptop style parts in the picture and I don't think that is what Pro Users want when it comes to being able to upgrade their machines...As for iOS7 I really wanted them to get rid of the old design but I expected much more than this and I really dislike how it looks. And something should have been done to move away from the relatively static grid based system. Very meh. Very very meh. I mean I like some of the apps I really do but the apps look like a Windows 8/Metro/Modern design. But the icons ugh they look awful.

Laptop style?

Try putting Xeon in a laptop. Try running those AMD GPUs in a laptop with good battery life. This is clearly a pro machine, it's just a miracle of apple's desktop design that it's so thin.

I am impressed by what they've shown of iOS 7 and can't wait to get my hands on it. Some much needed improvements to the built in apps, and a nice clean new look. iTunes Radio may even get me to pony up for iTunes Match.

"...iPhone 4 and later..." for IOS 7. Is there any direct language that said owners of 3GS and earlier are screwed?

It's not called "screwed", it's called "androided". As in "I'm sorry you didn't get any updates to your phone, looks like HTC androided you". 3GS was released June 2009 and is now officially discontinued. You should update your copy & paste text.

By laptop style parts I mean upgrade-wise. Things you don't want to see in a workstation computer where if you card goes bad now you are SOL because the replacements will be neither cheap or easy to install.. Want more hard drive space? Good luck. SSD's are still not at the point of capacity of the large platter drives not in an affordable way yet. Not that it matters you are stuck with that weird style drive which is less common.

"...iPhone 4 and later..." for IOS 7. Is there any direct language that said owners of 3GS and earlier are screwed?

It's not called "screwed", it's called "androided". As in "I'm sorry you didn't get any updates to your phone, looks like HTC androided you". 3GS was released June 2009 and is now officially discontinued. You should update your copy & paste text.

But seriously, iPhone 4 and later is pretty impressive.

Not that it matters, but Android updates are more modular... The OS might not get updated, but the core apps continue to get updated. So for example, you can have an HTC Inspire from many moons ago, it may still be running FroYo 2.2, but it will still have the latest and greatest mail app, calendar app, maps app, etc...

On iOS, those updates require an OS Update. Plus, now that Google is putting new API functionality into Play Services, those also get updated without an OS update... So that same HTC Inspire, will get the new User Activity detection, geo fencing, etc... Those types of new features on iOS requires an OS update.

Not saying that it's a replacement of OS updates, just saying that it's not quite the same, and isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be. And yes, I use an iPhone and iPad...

By laptop style parts I mean upgrade-wise. Things you don't want to see in a workstation computer where if you card goes bad now you are SOL because the replacements will be neither cheap or easy to install.. Want more hard drive space? Good luck. SSD's are still not at the point of capacity of the large platter drives not in an affordable way yet. Not that it matters you are stuck with that weird style drive which is less common.

I daresay the new Mac Pro looks easily repairable. The Graphics are on separate modules that look relatively easy to replace. Adding more hard drive space - you have SIX 20GBps ports. That gigaBYTE per second, not gigaBIT.

I appreciate that going forward things will be different with Android IFF you have a new phone with the latest software and IFF the carriers don't find some other way to screw users out of updates. You have to admit that the current situation wrt Android upgrades is pretty poor and it's not unreasonable for apple to not offer the latest iOS on 4 year old hardware. Is there a 4 year old Android phone getting a carrier supported upgrade to the latest Android version?

By laptop style parts I mean upgrade-wise. Things you don't want to see in a workstation computer where if you card goes bad now you are SOL because the replacements will be neither cheap or easy to install.. Want more hard drive space? Good luck. SSD's are still not at the point of capacity of the large platter drives not in an affordable way yet. Not that it matters you are stuck with that weird style drive which is less common.

I daresay the new Mac Pro looks easily repairable. The Graphics are on separate modules that look relatively easy to replace. Adding more hard drive space - you have SIX 20GBps ports. That gigaBYTE per second, not gigaBIT.

Not sure if I'm altogether thrilled by the new naming convention (though the "West Hollywood" or "Castro" releases might be interesting LOL), but then I am partial to cats... why not canines or sharks?

Of all the features of the upcoming OSX, I am probably most excited about the new full screen and spaces handling. Other stuff like Finder Tabs, menu on each screen, password manager ... are mostly already there with el-cheapo utilities. But the full-screen, oy finally seems to undo the Lion/Mt Lion full-screen disability.

STILL no ZFS? Hmph! At least I gots me some iBooks and better Notifications.

I still have to review the iOS7 stuff, and maybe kick the Beta around I think I have a spare 4S somewhere. Pity no iPad yet.

Its funny that this came out after Steve Jobs passing. His dream for the original Mac was exactly this- a closed box with great expansion via a high speed serial bus. He tried again with the first iMac and USB. This time Thunderbolt may finally be fast enough to keep up with the dream...

The one thing I don't like about the stunning Mac Pro design is the fact that the power button and all the ports are in the back. No front facing ports is a major inconvenience for plugging in a USB key, which many people do fairly regularly.

Also, consider a situation where people start taking advantage of all that touted external expandability. It will turn into a rats nest of wires, and when that happens, the user often prefers to put the machine and all its peripherals under the desk or somewhere out of the way. But with the power button in the back, an under the desk computer becomes a major pain to turn on/off.

The Mac Pro looks good, but raid array is my #1 desire and I see no mention. Hope they drop the price by $500 to account for reduced value - and even then I'm not sure I'd create user home dirs on an external RAID like I do on my current mp (bit of a pain to set up hard links, but nice once it's done as everything my family does save app installs goes on RAID).I really hope the "new" mp isn't one step fwd, two steps back, but Apple's been bumming me out these last few years so I kind of expect to be disappointed. Just like ms in the 90s. I really hope Apple turns things around and surprises with an mp that delivers value ahead of asthetics - unlike iDevices the pro is a tool for producing, not a bauble for ogling.

I am not sure how I feel about the Mac Pro; I see a lot of laptop style parts in the picture and I don't think that is what Pro Users want when it comes to being able to upgrade their machines.

Exactly. Isn't the point of the Mac Pro that you can swap the parts out, and that the tower is big enough to put more components, like hard drives, or larger components, like double-width extra-long graphics cards, into it?

If I wanted a Mac that wasn't integrated with a display, and that is limited in upgradeability, I would get a Mac Mini.

What parts do you believe cannot be swapped out, and where did you get this confirmation?

It looks like you can swap various boards out with relative ease, but I'll hold off on praise or condemnation until I know more.

Well, I saw a passing reference to OpenGL 4 and OpenCL matrix multiplication, which are both significant for propeller-heads. I'dl like to know some more about that, since matrix multiplication is a lot of what I do for a living.

The Mac Pro looks good, but raid array is my #1 desire and I see no mention. Hope they drop the price by $500 to account for reduced value - and even then I'm not sure I'd create user home dirs on an external RAID like I do on my current mp (bit of a pain to set up hard links, but nice once it's done as everything my family does save app installs goes on RAID).I really hope the "new" mp isn't one step fwd, two steps back, but Apple's been bumming me out these last few years so I kind of expect to be disappointed. Just like ms in the 90s. I really hope Apple turns things around and surprises with an mp that delivers value ahead of asthetics - unlike iDevices the pro is a tool for producing, not a bauble for ogling.

I've been using soft-raid (both ZFS and OSX native) in mac pro's for the last ~7 years. With the many cores available, it's possible to have a high performance soft-raid (and in someways, less prone to failure since you don't have an extra card that can fail) that does not impact the performance of the rest of the system.

If you require a hardware raid option, then external PCIe enclosures should work well. A single TB2 port will provide a theoretical max of 2.5GB/sec to any hardware based raid.

Your description of an mp (mac pro?) to external raid sounds slightly strange, as you could do it with a current mac pro, with a hardware raid or software raid, all in the same box as it currently stands and to a bootable volume. You cannot create hardlinks across mount points in UNIX, so, perhaps you mean soft links?

What I'm curious to see is what range of configurations the new Mac Pro provides. There's nothing inherent in the design that would prevent them from making a mac mini configuration in the new enclosure.

The lack of (apparent) hard drive bays in the new Mac Pro is the only thing that concerns me. My current Pro (early 2009 model, 2x4 core) has four HDs in it. 1x3TB, 2x2TB and a 500GB for Windows. If I look to replacing the old Pro with the new Pro it looks like I'm also going to have to spec out a NAS, which I'm willing to be isn't going to be cheap.

Which makes me wonder if an Apple-branded NAS is on the horizon (I mean a multi-drive NAS, not a Time Capsule). Probably not.

So: recommendations for a NAS that's (a) cheap, (b) silent, and (c) can take 4 HDs?

This is a signal of the cultural shift at Apple. It's Tim Cook's company now.

Ahem. The Rolling Stones are of the same vintage as Dylan and the Beatles. And Led Zeppelin might seem way later in terms of how quickly music was changing in the Sixties, but their first album was released in 1969, so by today's standards they were nearly contemporary with these other artists.

Tim Cook is only five years younger than Steve Jobs was, so you can hardly pitch it as a generational shift, but cultural maybe. It did catch my notice that they used "Whole Lotta Love" and "Gimme Shelter" to demo iRadio (choices I highly approved of!) Definitely different from the MOR selections they have employed in past presentations.

But, still, they didn't really leave the Sixties behind (or if they did it was only for the Seventies) which is a little odd. I guess the baby boomers are still calling the shots at Apple. They could at least update to -- I don't know -- U2 and Smashing Pumpkins? Bands that would still be too old to be recognized by my 15 year old, but at least it would be a step forward. (Although as a baby boomer myself, I would say keep pushing that Led Zeppelin out there as long as you can get away with it! They'll be putting us out to pasture soon enough...)

I am not sure how I feel about the Mac Pro; I see a lot of laptop style parts in the picture and I don't think that is what Pro Users want when it comes to being able to upgrade their machines...As for iOS7 I really wanted them to get rid of the old design but I expected much more than this and I really dislike how it looks. And something should have been done to move away from the relatively static grid based system. Very meh. Very very meh. I mean I like some of the apps I really do but the apps look like a Windows 8/Metro/Modern design. But the icons ugh they look awful.

Laptop style?

Try putting Xeon in a laptop. Try running those AMD GPUs in a laptop with good battery life. This is clearly a pro machine, it's just a miracle of apple's desktop design that it's so thin.

Mavericks - yay. Multi-screen done in what seems to be an obvious way. Certainly better than W8 handles it, and far far better than Lion ruined Spaces. OpenGL4, tabbed Finder (and Cocoa?). Better handling of sleep - should work on this years Macs at least. Seems like a positive upgrade. And no cat name! New era!iOS7 - almost made me buy the iPhone. Shame it won't run on my 4G iPod, but that just sits in the stereo.

I really like the Mac Pro. If I had a use for the power, and the room to run it (there is a reason I don't have many desktops any more!) I would buy this. People don't seem to get that it is all about the external expansion these days, and if this pushes Thunderbolt technology into the mainstream so more manufacturers build for it, then all the better.

Actually I do have a use for it - VM's. Sadly I really don't have the room.

I liked this WWDC keynote. It seemed lighter than the Jobs-era ones, and obviously more fun than last years. All the speakers looked like they were enjoying being there, and they even allowed for mistakes to happen! Sadly no "one more thing" but hey :-)

As far as laptop style parts go I don't see many. The processor is server class, the RAM is Full sized EEC RAM rather than SO modules, the graphics cards are not physically part of the motherboard and have dedicated VRAM, and the PCIe Flash module is modular rather than soldered on. Of the things listed above, the most laptop-like items are that the graphics cards do not have direct connection to the HDMI & Thunderbolt 2 ports and it only supports a single internal storage module. Beyond that, the quality of laptop components has reached a point that their performance and reliability is comparable even if their expandability is not.

Apple seems to be pushing Thunderbolt 2 (essentially a hybrid of MiniDisplayPort & external PCIe). I am hesitant due to years of seeing the majority of external buses (PS-2, serial, parallel, ADB, USB, FireWire) being vastly inferior to most internal counterparts (IDE/PATA, SATA, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe). That said I've seen plenty of comparable internal/external buses however (SCSI, SATA-eSATA, PCIe-Thunderbolt) so I wont dismiss external expandability offhand either. It not that I haven't seen RAID arrays for eSATA & Thunderbolt.

I just see Apple moving further away from practical devices and more about design. I think this is because of the influence of Johnny Ives and I think it will eventually kill Apple as a mainstream company. I think it forces it to be a electronics boutique for the affluent and prevents Apple from really expanding. The Mac Pro is a total disconnect from what it was and I think it will eventually push away more power users. Their is no doubt Apple will continue to have its supporters but its products do not appear to be addressing the markets with less affluent consumers and to me that spells a limited success in those Countries.

When I saw the thing (the Mac Pro) I thought it was really cool, then I saw the size comparison, and I realized that it was more like a coke can than what I would consider a pro desktop. I began to wonder whether the thing would tip over if all the ports were connected to devices, and if moving a monitor would pull on the cable enough to drag or tip the thing over.

"Where is the internal expansion?" I thought. Then I thought about the pre-installed dual FirePro's. "Apple is doing it again!" I thought. "Can't they just make ONE computer where I can call some of these shots? Can't I please just have a Mac OS X machine where I can have the video and such that I choose? After all these years, can Apple figure out how to make third-party video cards as compatible and fast as external devices?"

So, are ports the new slots? Perhaps its been a while for me, but I thought the point of a Pro desktop is to allow me to craft my own tool using a baseline system that has the size to handle internal add-ons that connect to faster internal buses. Can someone show me how Thunderbolt replaces PCI-E?

I am not being snarky here. Perhaps there is something I don't get. I always been told that the farther away you put a device from the CPU, the worse performance would be. Is it now best, in a max performance environment, to put your main large storage on long cables via ports than have them internal to the device connected to buses on the motherboard? Is thunderbolt's performance envelope so large that it encapsulates the performance of the highest speed storage devices available today, and there is no longer a need to keep things internal? And is video performance so over-the-top nowadays that there is no need to purchase third-party solutions? Someone enlighten me, please.

I'm actually somewhat surprised it's 4 and up and not 4S and up -- the 4 is now 3 years old, but you can still buy a brand new 4, so that's probably why.

I seriously doubt the 4 will be supported in IOS8.

As for IOS7 itself -- mixed bag. A lot of the features look great (swip up control panel, bigger folders, etc) but the home page looks UGLY as do many of the built in app icons. The graphical app changes are a mixed bag. I'll wait to see. I really want a 5S or 6 to replace my original 4 though.

No indication of being able to change default apps for things like maps, web, etc. either, much less changing keyboards. I didn't really expect the latter, but I was hopeful for the former.